About Me

Tuesday, 6 December 2011

How can Sony become a vertically indicated company?How did the release of Spider exemplify synergy?How did the makers of Monsters use convergence?How was vinyl marketing used to promote Monsters?

Sony is a company divided into several sectors and is considered a major institution in the world of entertainment as it provides many different forms of technology. Sony is also often referred to as BMG Music Entertainment, and also owns a variety of other companies when looking at the stages of music distribution, production and consumption. Another aspect of Sony is their ownership of the rights to distribute music artists, for example Britney Spears, Foo Fighters etc. They have the ability to advertise and sell the music products of these artists through CD’s and the availability of online downloading.

Sony have a great deal of products available to customers like MP3 players, televisions, games consoles and many more. Any music that is featured on a particular film or game, Sony owns the right to that song and at the same time, promoting the music and producing a bigger audience for the artist. They have produced some copyright products, for example their games, in order to prevent there being any distribution from other companies, like their rivals Microsoft. This increases profit for the company because if a person wants to play a particular game, they have to buy a Playstation because the products are exclusive to Sony, which is similar to films because Sony own a variety of cinemas and some films are made by their company, therefore increasing profit.

Synergy is the interaction and cooperation of two or more organizations or substances in order to increase the effect to be greater than what the result would be from individually separate effects. A good example is how Sony produced the film Spiderman, which was originally a comic book by the company Marvel, who Sony had to receive permission from before they could turn the comic books into a film. This enabled them to create a synergy as they combined their ideas in order to produce a successful film franchise. Even though the film will be produced and distributed by Sony, Marvel will still receive their share of profits from whatever gross the film collects from the box office. Along with this, Nickleback is a music artist, whose songs were included in the Spiderman films, giving Sony the opportunity to make more money from this but at the same time to promote the artist to a wider audience range.

An example of viral marketing was used in the film 2012, which was frequently used in order to try and gain as much publicity as possible. A fictional organization called ‘Institute for Human Continuity’ was credited for a marketing campaign in order to promote the film.Jackson Curtis was the author of a fictional book called Farewell Atlantis, along with promotions from technological programs like media streaming, blog updates and radio broadcasts given by the actor who played Charlie Frost from the following website: http://www.thisistheend.com/ , which further promoted the film without the realization from people at that particular time.A level of controversy was exposed on November 12, 2008, when the studio released a teaser trailer for the movie, showing a tsunami taking place in the Himalayas, also including many scientific concepts that suggested the world was actually going to end in 2012. They also declared the theoretical notion that the Government were in denial and remaining ignorant to the possible event instead of preparing for it. ‘Find out the truth by searching 2012 in search engines’ was the ending quote on the trailer, which was hugely criticized by the Guardian newspaper for the marketing effectiveness apparently containing huge flaws and that this was associated with websites that also made claims about 2012.

A mass violation of ethics was encountered by NASA when the studio for Sony launched a viral marketing website operated by ‘Institute for Human Continuity’, which is fictional. During the launch of this, the public were apparently allowed to sign up for a lottery number to which if they won would obtain the opportunity to be rescued from the possibly global destruction and have a chance to continue on with their lives. This website was mistaken for being a genuine approach to the apparent apocalypse of 2012 and NASA received messages from people who were contemplating suicide in order to save themselves if they weren’t successful enough to win this ‘lottery’. NASA agreed that this was a violation of ethics upon people and was a way of extortion from the studio who were risking lives in order to make money from product promotion.